Harry Price
included a chapter on his sittings with Helen Duncan in his Leaves from a
Psychist's Case-Book (Victor Gollancz, 1933) which was published
two years after the investigation at the National Laboratory of Psychical
Research. Reproduced here is the complete contents of Chapter XI
including the plates which featured the Duncan case.

I suppose it is generally admitted
that the Commandment which is most frequently broken is the first.The
miser makes money his god; the bibliolater worships his books; the
politician lives for power, the soldier for glory, the actor for applause,
etc. But strangest of all are those infatuated people who worship
strips of cheese-cloth when these are served up with hymns, garnished
with prayers, and dangled before their eyes in the dim, religious light of
the sťance-room.

During the years
1931-32 there was a cheese-cloth mania in Great Britain which was almost as
remarkable (and much more diverting) as the "tulipomania" of the
seventeenth century. For the years I have named saw the meteoric flight
across the psychic firmament of the Scots materialising medium, Mrs. Helen
Duncan. Perhaps "meteoric flight" is hardly the term I should use, as
the lady in question weighed more than seventeen stone.

I first heard of Mrs. Duncan in
1929 through the spiritualist press.
I read of sťances, held almost
in full light, at which phantoms materialised out of space, danced, sang,
joked, walked about the room, and hobnobbed with the sitters generally.
As
I do not believe one-tenth of what I read in the spiritualist press, I was
not particularly thrilled.

But later I began to receive
first-hand accounts of Mrs. Duncan's marvels from friends of mine.
One of
them actually presented me with a bottle of distilled water containing a
piece of white stuff which he told me was "teleplasm" which had exuded
from some portion of the medium's anatomy.

I was soon engaged upon the
histology of the strip of "teleplasm," a portion of which I handed to Dr.
X, a distinguished London analyst. I agreed with his opinion that the
stuff looked like the white of a hard-boiled egg.

p.201

Dr. X's analysis confirmed his
opinion that the "teleplasm" was the white of an egg mixed with salts of
iron and other chemicals.

I also analysed the "teleplasm"
and made up a number ol slides of it for the microscope.
Also, based on
the analysis I had obtained, I made some "synthetic teleplasm" which
could not be distinguished from Mrs. Duncan's variety. My "teleplasm"
was composed of the following substances in varying quantities :

White of a
new-laid egg.

Ferric
chloride.

Phosphoric acid and stale urine
mixed with gelatine.

Hot margaric acid from olive oil.

So now the reader knows what
ghosts are made of !

Every spiritualist was deeply
impressed with all this handing around of teleplasm and the pirouetting
phantoms, and a Dundee doctor brought Mrs. Duncan across the Border to
London to exhibit her powers to the faithful at one of the spiritualist
societies.

It happened that the National
Laboratory Rooms comprised the top flat of the building in which the
spiritualists' test was carried out. Great preparations for the
sťance
were made and a number of persons, including Sir Oliver Lodge, were
present. Needless to say, I was not invited!
Looking over the
banisters as they trooped up the stairs, I could not help wondering what
the afternoon would bring forth. I was soon to be informed, however, as
very shortly the floor of my office reverberated to the "Hurrahs!" and
"Bravos!" of those beneath, and I knew that Mrs. Duncan had received
the cachet of the spiritualists. The cheese-cloth mania had
started.

For the next six months Mrs.
Duncan sat regularly with the spiritualists, a substantial fee being
charged for the privilege of' seeing the signs and wonders alleged to
occur. Her miracles were written up in the spiritualist press and the
public was invited to pay for sittings with the woman. And yet when, as a
member of the public, I applied for a sitting, the spiritualists refused
point blank to allow me even to set foot in the sťanceroom! What were they afraid of?

In April 1931 the friendship
between the medium and her

p.202

husband and the spiritualists
became slightly unstuck, as during that month Mr. Duncan wrote to me and
offered my Council a sťance at the National Laboratory of
Psychical Research. We accepted, and the first scientific test ever held
with the womantook place on May 4th of the
same year. A number of distinguished people were present, including
Professor Dr. William McDougall, F.R.S., the eminent psychologist.

At this first sťance the
medium wore her own garments (a pair of black sateen knickers, a man's
coat made of the same material, and a pair of black stockings), which she
brought with her. We examined them carefully, and Professor McDougall and
others examined the medium's body externally. We did not make a thorough
medical examination of the medium, as this was a "friendly" sťance
and we wished to see the phenomena before adopting rigorous
controlling methods.

The medium having donned her
special garments, she was led into the sťance-room by Professor
McDougall and myself, and placed in the curtained recess known as the
cabinet. This was at 8.7 p.m.
In a few seconds the medium was in trance,
and within a minute the cabinet curtains parted and we beheldthe medium covered from head to
foot with-cheese-cloth! There appeared to be yards of it.
Some of it was
trailing on the floor; one end was poked up her nostril; a piece was
issuing from her mouth. It moved, it writhed, it waggled, it squirmed on
the floor, it spread itself out like an apron. Then the medium closed the
curtains and the spectacle was hidden from view. All these transformations
and permutations took place in a red light bright enough to read small
print by. Every person and object in the
sťance-room was plainly
visible.

Then we heard the voice of "Albert Stewart," Mrs. Duncan's chief "control."
"Albert" is supposed to
be the spirit of a Dundee pattern-maker who emigrated to Sydney, N.S.W. "Albert" had a lot to say, and spoke with a drawl.

Then the voice of a little child
control was heard behind the curtains. This was "Peggy," who apologised
for not coming in front of the curtains as she "had no frock on."

Curtains opened again and we saw
more cheese-cloth-the medium was covered from head to foot as with a large
shawl. The curtains closed once more.

At nine o'clock I asked "Albert"
whether I could bind

p.203

Mrs. Duncan to the chair. He said
"Sure!" So Professor McDougall and I bound her thoroughly to the
armchair by means of adhesive surgical tape-the stuff with which Chicago
gangsters truss up their victims. The phenomena at once ceased, "Albert"
afterwards remarking that I had stopped the medium's circulation. We
loosened the ties.

Just before the binding process I
asked "Albert" if I could feel the "teleplasm."
He said I could; at
the same time the curtains were opened and I picked up a trail of the
stuff. It was about 30
inches wide, and rather damp. It felt
exactly like my summer-weight undervest. I stretched it, and the tactile
impression was exactly as if I held a piece of cheese-cloth.
I smelt it,
and even the odour was reminiscent of a bit of ripe gorgonzola.

This first sťance was over
just before ten o'clock, and I must say that I was deeply impressed: I
was impressed with the brazen effrontery that prompted the Duncans to come
to my Laboratory in an attempt to "put over" their stuff on our experts; I was impressed with the amazing credulity of the spiritualists who had
sat with the Duncans for six solid months, and with the fact that they had
advertised her "phenomena" as genuine.

The only thing that puzzled us at
our first sťance with Mrs. Duncan was where she kept the stuff.What we had seen was merely a length of cheese-cloth,
about 6 or 8 feet long and 30 inches wide, made to take different shapes and
forms in order to simulate phantoms of various sizes. Although we had
examined the medium, we had not medically explored the orifices of the
body-favourite hiding-places with fake women mediums.

We arranged some further tests
with the medium, and I determined to stiffen up the fore-control, and also
to photograph the phantoms as they appeared. Curiously enough, the medium
consented to this medical examination and Mr. Duncan allowed us to take
pictures of the "phenomena" as they appeared. Also, we made for her a
one-piece garment.

The incredulous reader might ask
why we did not seize the cheese-cloth "materialisations" as they
appeared. We could have done so a hundred times, and we were under no
promise not to. But "grabbing" is a crude form of investigation, and we
have more scientific-and convincing-ways of arriving

p.204

at the truth. And the "grabbing"
would have ended the experiments once and for all, and we should have lost
valuable data.

At the next three sťances
with Mrs. Duncan I took a series of photographs and our theory concerning
the "phantoms" was confirmed. We secured extraordinary pictures of
cheese-cloth in various formations such as veils, trails, tails, twists,
sheets, and knots. The pictures of these cheese-cloth tableaux are the
wonder of all beholders.

Every length of it that was spread
in front of our cameras was of about the same size. Every length shows the
selvedge, warp and weft, rents in the material where it had been worn by
constant use, and frayed edges. One piece reveals dirt marks where the
medium trod upon it. Two pieces show crease marks where "Albert" (being
Scotch) carefully folded it when not in use. The only thing missing on
these cheese-cloth phantoms is the price ticket. We bought a few yards of
cheese-cloth at Woolworths, draped it over our secretary, photographed it,
and it was admitted that no one could tell the difference between the
Woolworth and "Albert" variety of spook.

But our photographs revealed other
things: we found that a hand we had seen at one of the sťances was
a rubber surgical or household glove at the end of a cheese-cloth support.
At another sitting we saw a child's head which, "Albert" informed us,
was the spirit "Peggy." Our cameras revealed the fact that this
particular "Peggy" was merely a picture of a girl's head cut from a
magazine cover and stuck on the cheese-cloth. We also secured pictures of
safety-pins which had been used in forming the cheese-cloth into various
shapes.

During the progress of our
experiments (in which such distinguished scientists as Professor Dr.
McDougall, Professor Dr. J. C. Flugel, etc. took part) we made the
fore-control of the medium more and more severe. Every orifice of her body
was medically explored-and we found nothing. But by a process of deletion
we discovered where the cheese-cloth must be concealed.
If one knows that
something is hidden in one of ten boxes, and that only nine of the boxes
can be examined, it is obvious that that something is in the tenth box.
In
the case of Mrs. Duncan the "tenth box" was her stomach-the one place we
could not easily explore. We formed the opinion that

p.205

Mrs. Duncan was a regurgitator,
i.e. a person who could swallow things and bring them up again at will-a
curious faculty which is not so rare as is generally supposed.

Of course there are several ways
in which medical men can examine a person's stomach. There is the "stomach camera," a tiny photographic apparatus which gives us pictures of
our internal economy. There is the stomach pump (rather crude); a violent
emetic (which is not pleasant); a medical exploration under a light
anesthetic; and the X-rays.

So at the fourth sťance we
decided to use the X-rays. We knew that the rays would not reveal the
cheese-cloth, as the stuff casts no shadow, but we hoped for a safety-pin
or something similar. We also knew that the psychological effect of
the apparatus on the medium would be valuable, and in this we were not
mistaken.

At the conclusion of the fourth
sťance on May 28th, 1931, we led the medium to a settee in the
sťance-room and gave the signal for the X-ray apparatus to be wheeled
in from an adjoining room. At the sight of the apparatus the medium seemed
scared, and promptly went off' into another alleged trance, from which she
soon recovered. She refused to be X-rayed.
Her husband advised her to
submit, telling her that it was quite painless and merely a matter of
seconds. The approach of Mr. Duncan seemed to infuriate her, and she
became hysterical. She jumped up and dealt him a smashing blow on the face
which sent him reeling. She then made a lunge at Dr. William Brown, who
fortunately avoided the blow.

The medium then said she wanted to
retire to the lavatory, so Mrs. Goldney, a Council member, and Dr. William
Brown accompanied her to the hall, in which was the door leading to the
street. Then the medium found that she did not want to use the
lavatory and sat down on a chair. Suddenly, without the slightest warning,
she jumped up, pushed Mrs. Goldney aside, unfastened the door, and dashed
into the street, where she had another attack of alleged hysterics and
commenced tearing her sťance garment to pieces. Her husband dashed
after her, followed by the other sitters.
She was found clutching the railings, screaming, and
Mr. Duncan was trying to pacify her.

It was a most extraordinary scene. If the reader can visualise a woman weighing more than seventeen stone,
clad in a one-piece

p.206

black satin garment, locked to the
railings and screaming at the top of her voice, he will have a fair idea
of what we witnessed that evening. Pieces of
sťance garment were
found in the road the next morning.

Of course, crowds collected and
the police arrived. The medical members of our Council explained to the
constables what had happened, thus preventing their fetching the
ambulance, which they threatened to do.

At last we got her into the
laboratory again, and then the unexpected happened. She demanded an X-ray
examination! But it was now too late, as our control had been broken
owing to the fact that the medium had been alone in the street with her
husband for a minute or so and we formed the theory that during that time
she had passed the cheese-cloth to her husband. To test this theory Dr.
William Brown asked Mr. Duncan to turn out his pockets. The medium's
husband refused point blank to be searched.

At every sťance with Mrs.
Duncan, "Albert" promised that he would allow us to cut off a portion of
teleplasm, but he failed to keep his word-until the fifth and last
sťance.

After the extraordinary scenes
which occurred at the fourth test, I imagined that we had seen the last of
the medium. But I was mistaken.
Mr. Duncan came to see me and admitted
that both he and his wife had done the wrong thing in upsetting us.
He
offered to give us another sťance on June 4th, and we accepted.

For our fifth experiment with Mrs.
Duncan we decided to make the fore-control still more thorough, and to
that end we asked Dr. X and Dr. Z, two medical men on the staff of a
famous hospital, to make the necessary bodily examination.
This they did
very thoroughly. They brought a bag of tools with them, took off their
coats to the job, and really got down to it. But they found nothing. Every
orifice and crack where an instrument or a hand would go was thoroughly
explored; every nook and cranny was examined; but at each fresh place
they drew blank. This all sounds very terrible, but it is modern psychical
research: a technique forced upon us by the amazing tricks of the
mediums.

There was still one place that
could not be explored without an anesthetic and that was the stomach.

p.207

The medium was led into the
cabinet, the curtains closed, and in a few seconds she was in an alleged
trance.

"Albert" then spoke: "You
asked me to allow you to cut something off. I will allow you to cut it off
and then I will have to go." He then said "Are you ready?" and the
curtains slowly opened. We saw the medium with a long white strip or
tongue of something hanging from her mouth. It was about twelve inches
long and an inch wide.

It was arranged that when we saw
any teleplasm one of us was to jump up and cut a piece off. We each had a
pair of scissors, and it was a weird sight to see the glint of steel round
the circle as the scissors flashed in the red light. It reminded me of a
sewing-bee.

When the white strip appeared Dr.
X, who was nearest the medium, entered the cabinet and caught hold of the
white tongue with his left hand, at the same time cutting away with his
right. Screams from the medium.
At last he secured a few inches, which I
immediately placed in a bottle of alcohol. Dr. X told us that, when he
pulled it, the stuff broke in his hand like a wad of sodden paper.
The
remainder of the "teleplasm" disappeared down her throat.
We got no more
phenomena that night.

After the sťance we
examined the "teleplasm" at our leisure, and it appeared to be a tube of
paper, flattened and folded zigzag, like a concertina.

Next morning we handed portions of
the "teleplasm" to Mr. William Bacon, B.Sc., F.I.C., the chief analyst to
the paper trade. This gentleman analysed our "prize" and declared that
the stuff was merely a cheap, thin paper, like a strip of a toilet roll,
soaked in white of egg and folded into a flattened tube.
The paper was
made partly of chemical pulp and partly of mechanical pulp. Under the
microscope the marks of the machine that pulped it are plainly visible.

A few days later we invited Mr.
Duncan to have a heart-to-heart talk with us and to explain why he had
taken £50 from us for some photographs of cheese-cloth and a strip of
toilet paper. He pleaded ignorance of his wife's doings, though he
admitted our evidence was conclusive. He said he was still convinced that
Mrs. Duncan could produce genuine phenomena, and offered us another
sťance at which his wife would be under

p.208

a rigid physical control. The test
was arranged for July 2nd, but, without informing us, the Duncans
left for Scotland on June 23rd.

That ended our adventures with the
Duncans. I wrote a
history of our tests which caused a sensation when
it was published. The strip of paper we saw at the last
sťance
proved conclusively that the "medium" could secrete objects in her
internal economy and produce them at will-in other words, regurgitate.

The reader might well imagine that
my damning report on lhe Duncans finished the "mediumship."
Not a bit of
it! It acted as an excellent advertisement for the woman and her curious
powers, and spiritualists on both sides of the Tweed began falling over
themselves in order to obtain sittings with her. The cheese-cloth mania
had a fresh lease of life.

.
. . .
. . .
.

The visit of the Duncans to the
National Laboratory had a curious sequel. A Miss Mary McGinlay called on
us in February 1932 and told us she had accompanied Mrs. Duncan
to London and had acted as maid to her. She said she had some important
information for us. She was interviewed by our Council, and her statements
were legally drawn up in the form of a Statutory Declaration.
On February
22nd, 1932, she attended before a Commissioner for Oaths and made the
declaration.

Miss McGinlay's story is an
amazing one, and sheds some light on our experiments. She states that she
purchased pieces of butter-muslin for Mrs. Duncan and that these pieces "appear to be identical" with those which I photographed at the
sťances. She recognised tears in the fabric as being the same.

She also declared on oath that
after a sťance "Mrs. Duncan used to get me to wash out a length of
this muslin. The muslin
had a rotten smell. It put me in mind of the
smell of urine.... She would give it to me just as she had used it, and
then it would be much stained and slimy."

On the night of the sťance
when Mr. Duncan refused to be searched at the National Laboratory, Miss
McGinlay met him in the road near the house where they were staying.
Mr.
Duncan "took a roll of butter-muslin out of his pocket and said that
Mrs. Duncan had passed it to him in the street when they

p.209

had been alone for a few minutes
after she had dashed out of the sťance-room at the National
Laboratory of Psychical Research. He said that the people at the
Laboratory had asked him to be searched and that he had made the excuse
that his underclothes were very old, etc."

Miss McGinlay concludes: " During
the latter period of my stay with Mrs. Duncan in London, I formed the
opinion that the lengths of cheese-cloth which I had sometimes washed for
Mrs. Duncan had been swallowed by her. The conclusion was forced upon me
that the cheese-cloth was swallowed by her and then brought up again
during a sťance."

After our damning report had been
published Mrs. Duncan was taken up officially by the spiritualists and
given a diploma by the Spiritualists' National Union! Sittings were
booked for her all over the country, and devotees fell down and worshipped
her cheese-cloth puppets. But she came a cropper at Edinburgh.

A distinguished Scots lady, Miss
Esson Maule, had a sťance with the medium and arranged that some
well-known Edinburgh people should be present. The meeting was held on
January 6th, 1933.

The usual "spirits" materialised,
and towards the end of the sitting "Peggy" was seized by Miss Maule at
the same time as someone switched on a light. A terrific struggle between
Miss Maule and Mrs. Duncan took place. It was a case of "pull Devil, pull
baker," with "Peggy" as the prize. Miss Maule ripped "Peggy" up the
middle and got her arm through it, but ultimately had to leave go.
The
police were called and the case created a considerable sensation.

In an affidavit sworn by several
of the sitters it is stated that "Peggy" was a woman's stockinette
undervest. Mrs. Duncan was persuaded to hand this over, and the tear where
Miss Maule's arm went through it is plainly visible. The vest was sealed
with the signatures of most of those present, and I have been promised it
for my museum of "psychic" curiosities.

The affair of the undervest
attracted the attention of the Scots legal authorities, and Mrs. Duncan
stood her trial for fraudulent mediumship at Edinburgh on May 3rd,
1933.
The trial of the Crown versus Duncan lasted two days, and Sheriff
Macdonald, K. C., who presided, reserved his judgment, which was delivered
on May 11th, 1933.
The woman was convicted

p.210

and fined £10 or one month's
imprisonment. I sat through this trial, and my only comment
is that I was amazed at the credulity exhibited by some of the witnesses
for the defence: it was credulity bordering on imbecility.
I heard very
similar statements when I sat through the eleven days' libel action
brought against the Daily Mail by Mrs. Meurig Morris, the trance
medium, which was heard before the late Mr. Justice McCardie in 1932.

The conviction of Mrs. Duncan was
brought up and discussed at the Annual General Meeting of the
Spiritualists' National Union (the governing body in Great Britain), held
at Doncaster on July 1st, 1933, and a vote of confidence in the medium was
carried by fifty-seven votes to two. Also, the diploma or certificate
previously issued to Mrs. Duncan by the S.N.U. was renewed.
(See the TwoWorlds for July 14th, 1933.)
Comment is superfluous.

The Duncan case is an
extraordinary one, and when investigators are confronted with such
problems as a regurgitating "medium" (whose "teleplasm" is found to
consist of white of egg, toilet paper, undervest, and cheese-cloth), is it
any wonder that I insist that the time has now arrived for orthodox
science to lend us a hand in the elucidation of the mysteries of the
sťance-room? *

* As this work is passing through
the press, I am informed that the Home Secretary is contemplating
legislation in order to regulate mediumship and to protect the public from
those who batten on its credulity. It is a most difficult problem.